forgotmylastusername @ forgotmylastusername @lemmy.ml

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144

Joined

5 yr. ago

There's only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.

Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.

It is majority bots. I got the groundhog day feeling too. So a few years ago I started looking at the account that post rather than the posts itself. There's a simple pattern. The account is registered but lays dormant for a couple months. Then it becomes active and starts reposting top ranked post of all time from subreddits. Their comments are copy pasted out of replies to old posts.

It's inexplicable why the real human users put up with it though. At some point the zeitgeist stopped having baseline expectation of content quality.

More recently there's a newer phenomenon where clickbait stories ("My (45M) wife (18F) of 5 years left me everything but the icecube trays AITA") are posted by brand new accounts. Except all those subreddits don't allow brand new accounts to post. So it must be the mods are selectively approving them. They are farming outrage with stories (most likely fake) meant to maximize user activity.

He's a university professor. That's their bread and butter. It's a skill they learn to prevent undergrads from nodding off during their lectures.

Free speech versus civility. Say what you want but don't think you won't get punched in the face for being an asshole. On the internet you should absolutely be able to get punched in the face. The virtual version of that is being modded. Which is apparently tantamount to human rights violations these days so mods have had to walk on eggshells. It's no wonder the old guard have been leaving in droves.

There was never a time in the past when you wouldn't receive a digital face punching for being an ass. As time went on people started giving up on reddit. Especially mods who cared to foster communities people wanted to use. Mods became glorified bot operators. "Automated customer service lines" as someone else said. And so the trolls have completely run amok on that platform. Usually there is no getting hold of a real human moderator. Other times they're so checked out they themselves get trolled into banning anyone but the griefers.

Because reddit is largely devoid of expertise by now. This is talking in circles. The point is that the user base well stocked with a healthy breadth of knowledge is able to call out bad posts. We both agree subreddits aren't working. It is for these reasons. Relying on sole expert moderators doesn't work.

The user base was supposed to be the main arbiter of such things.

Mods weren't ever supposed to anybody but janitors. That isn't in a derogatory tone. The anonymous userbase was the original value proposition of reddit. The expertise came from random nobodies. Usernames didn't matter on reddit because nobody looked at it. It seems this is long forgotten history from a time when the internet was primarily IT nerds.

By the time mods were becoming somebodies, reddit was past its prime. Once the power structures started forming it was over. As we're seeing now reddit is hinges on single point of failure. The expertise among the userbase has gradually left the platform long before this API stuff. A long slow process years in the making.

Internet janitors are a dirty but necessary job not unlike the real world. Somebody has to scrub toilets and pick produce. People are a-holes on the internet who need to be put in their place. Reddit has long since become too hoity-toity for that. Now mods are supposed to be experts in their field. Too high to be digital toilet scrubbers. Too scared of "muh free speech" to janitor the Greater Fuckwads anymore. So reddit is an asylum run by the inmates. Expertise can't be assed to contribute to a dumpster.

On another note. The imgur purge has also contributed to the barren wasteland of reddit content history. So many dead posts.

China is getting too good at chip manufacturing. That scares imperialists.

That wasn't an attempt to be disingenuous. It was to mark a reference point in your text. You're trying to extrapolate arguments where there may or may not be any. That's no better than how reddit is.

Didn't he prove it's easy to repair? What exactly is the subscription?

There isn't any "smart" device technology involved. It's a simple analog design. Off the shelf batteries and a motor. No special tools required. The only problem with the design is a liquid resistant seal.

I'm not certain their point was the anti echo chamber thing. In other words the phony "free speech" thing that means you have to let bigots ply their rhetoric.

Do I think people can go too far and literally only surround themselves with “yes men” socially?

Reddit has serious problems localized extremum. To detach it from politicization take the 3D printing subreddits for example. For a while they were convinced it's the second arrival of Jesus. At one point it was said every household would have this appliance. Like a washing machine or refrigerator. You must conform to the talking points. Cryptocurrency is a recent one. There is no talking like normal people in those subreddits without being faced with scripted rhetoric. Real life isn't like this. In real life people don't talk like stump speeches.

Pay to use. Then they sell your data. Double dipping.

There's got to be more metadata involved in fingerprinting. The type of content you're looking at. Maybe even deriving some sort of signature from your mouse movements.

It's going to be even worse for a while with the writers strike.

I thought that's gentoo.

Nope. Reddit orphans posts and comments from accounts. I don't know the hows or whys.

Last week I stumbled on a 15 year account who tried to do a full wipe before abandoning reddit. Their last and only comment in their profile is their farewell message. Except when you Google search their username it shows their content is still there. Just not associated to their profile page anymore.

I used message boards well into the 2010s. Digg and reddit were a curiosity that I mostly lurked.

I remember I got downvoted on Digg for anecdote about how the climate had been changing over the years in my area. The comments in those types of posts were primarily deniers saying there wasn't scientific evidence of climate change.

Popular tech (a la pop sci or pop psych). Brave uses the right techy sounding buzzwords to appeal to the pseudo power user.

Food, healthcare, housing. The basic pillars of living standards. Every level of government is twiddling their thumbs.